I always get excited when we’re ready to launch new software. One of the benefits of what I do at CounterPath is that I get to talk to customers, and blog about the careful thought and hard work our teams have put into our products.

In recent months, the Stretto Platform™ 2.0 release has been a main focus area for so many of our team members.

I’m excited today to let you know that we’ve released the Stretto Platform 2.0 to our on-premises and hosted customers. The release is a major uplift over our previous Stretto 1.9.1 release.

Before I get to all the things, let’s start with a brief history of the Stretto Platform.

Some customers have seemed concerned about deploying Stretto due to the fact that it’s “only version 2.0.” We understand that might sound young. So how mature is the product? The simple truth is that for the past 14 years we’ve been building the Stretto Platform under a few different marketing family names. During those years we’ve consistently released between two and three releases per year. The Stretto Platform began its long life as a next-generation mobile switch focused on a concept that at the time was brand new: the internet was coming to mobile devices. Stretto’s predecessor was the NCG, a platform built to manage the transition of calls between the PLMN and IP networks. You’ve likely made a call over IMS networks and over your home or WiFi office network, this is all in the area covered by that platforms early IPR. The NCG platform was a carrier grade, five-9’s capable telecom switch, but instead of a RF network of base stations and cell towers, the NCG used IP networks.

As we evolved the NCG it soon took on other acronym ridden functions like CCS. The services provided by the platform moved beyond the area of convergence and onto items like managing client configurations, collecting traces, quality reporting and providing UC features that wrap around other traditional NGN and SIP switches. In 2014, we decided that like our Bria softphones, our server products also needed a family name. The Stretto Platform became that name, and ever since then each set of functional services deployed on top of that platform became a module. NCG became the convergence server module, CCS became the provisioning sever module, and so on and so forth.

History lesson over; let’s get to the good stuff.

Stretto Platform 2.0 is a continued evolution and revolution packaged in a single release. This release has a few hundred new features and refinements that won’t make the cut for this blog post. Each is the result of the careful efforts of our product, engineering and support teams working on gathering requirements to improve the usability, performance, security, or other critical aspects of the Stretto Platform and its component modules.

Stretto Platform is a revolution because of significant platform updates and a new Stretto module available with this release.

Public Cloud Ready

We’ve moved past our need for premises/layer 2 connectivity for Stretto deployments. Stretto is fully HA ready and five nines capable when deployed in the Cloud.

Stretto cloud-ready capabilities have been tested in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). We’re working with a select set of customers to deploy Stretto 2.0 into their public cloud environments and we have production workloads already running in our own instances of cloud provider networks. This is a large leap forward to modernize how our customers deploy Stretto.

Many existing and new Stretto Platform customers will continue to deploy on hardware and on virtual machines in their own data centers, where layer 2 traffic is permitted and where Stretto fits comfortably inside their networks. There’s been no change here. This deployment mode is supported and will continue to be supported going forward.

Bria Push to on-premises customers

Stretto Platform 2.0 introduces a new module for on-premises customers. The push server module is the implementation of push technology CounterPath has been offering to our retail, SaaS and hosted Stretto Platform customer base for close to a year. The Bria Push service that this module offers allows customers to implement push for their SIP platforms, the SIP platforms setup by their partners, customers and third parties. It is interoperable with thousands of our customer's SIP servers.

If you are currently an on-premises Stretto customer; you can download documentation and updated installer software today. If you are a hosted Stretto customer, the benefits of the hundreds of improvements in this release will rolled out in the coming weeks.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 and CentOS 7 Support

The continued modernization of the Stretto Platform is important to our customers. The shift from RHEL 6 and CentOS 6 to version 7 also brings with it many modernizations, including file systems, kernel versions, a shift from init.d to systemd and new networking configuration options. We are also at the same point in the RHEL/CentOS extended support lifecycle where we think it makes sense to move releases. We continue our commitment to support both Red Hat and CentOS to allow our customers to choose the Linux distribution that makes the most sense to them.

As always, thanks to our great team and we look forward to hearing back from our customers about the new release.

If you're a current Stretto Platform customer, you can access the software and documentation from your Stretto download account.

Not yet a customer? Head to our Stretto Platform page to explore how we can streamline and enhance communications in your organization.

Jim O’Brien is the Vice President of Server Engineering for CounterPath and directs his team in architecting, building and supporting server solutions that work closely with CounterPath softphone applications. Jim designed, launched, and supported wholesale and enterprise VoIP networks for GTE, Genuity, and Level(3). Jim joined CounterPath with the acquisition of BridgePort Networks in 2008.